Gibson made a small circle over the city and set down almost exactly where he took off. That's unusual for hot-air balloons. "One year, I landed in a Hells Angels' barbecue pit," Gibson said.

In 1999, Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones landed near Cairo after becoming the first people to circle the globe by balloon. In 2005, a 17-year-old boy at the Red Lake Indian Reservation in ...